Path 2

György Pálfi’s Batshit Crazy Taxidermia

August 11, 2009

A batshit-crazy whatsit that applies a dazzling visual vocabulary to gleefully crass buffoonery, Taxidermia suggests a Jackass flick as directed by Roy Andersson. The stoner’s fantasy of non sequiturs and carnivalesque body horrors begins, almost sensibly, with a possibly retarded Army dude singeing the hairs on his body, then shooting flames from his cock—a phantasmagoric expression of the lengths to which bored stiffs will go in order to get off. The dim-witted perv will go out with an unexpected bang, but not before slipping his dick into a freezing tub of water, a makeshift vagina carved into the side of his cabin, and finally into a portly tease who will give birth to his son, a future giant, literally, of the speed-eating world. The tableaux depicting the pathetic, single-minded lives of father, son, and, finally, sickly taxidermist grandson are insanely stitched together with highly conceptual graphics, and director György Pálfi’s vision includes a 360-degree pan around a vomit trough and the conflation of an orgasm to the killing of a pig. All this helps to shape Pálfi’s crudely bombastic but impressive philosophical view of the body as landscape and art, a source of personal discovery, wonder, and annihilation.